“... idea. Borges is always imagining, even reviewing, potential works. Think of that wonderful list of Pierre Menard’s Nachlass with its Oulipian sounding experiments in French metrics and Boolean logic, essays on modifying the rules of chess, and ‘monograph on the possibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary … which would be ideal objects created ...”

“... caught between varying states of complicity and outright defiance. Filmmakers – Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Ophüls, Louis Malle, Claude Berri and recently the creators of Un village français, a seven-season blockbuster for France 3 – have handled the business of improvisation and negotiation much better. Writers were quicker still to ...”

“... diners’ hands have already fondled your focaccia. Order your steak well-done and, unlike Marco Pierre White, Bourdain won’t throw you out of the restaurant: he’ll only give you the rankest piece of meat going. You probably don’t want to know about the rodents. And if all this unsettles your delicate sensibilities, then ‘tant pis, man’. ‘God ...”

“... Canadians make much of something Pierre Trudeau said in a speech to the Washington Press Club in 1969: ‘Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.’ Canada shares a continental market, the world’s longest undefended border, a language and increasingly a culture with the US, and seems, in recent decades, to have lost its ability to adopt a critical – or even guarded – view of its neighbour when developing and implementing its own foreign policy ...”

“... that the great artists of the present have helped us to see what we had for so long been blind to. Pierre Daix’s exciting recent book on Picasso’s cubist years makes the point repeatedly: to go forward, one has to go back, just as to be able to go back one has to go forward. And it is not simply a matter of art and art history. The uncanny sympathy with ...”

“... could move at will between the police state of the Ariège and a free world. For one of them, Pierre Maury, the book investigates a whole world of moral values, and the story of a life of hard work and of poverty broken by short periods of wealth. If for nothing other than his views on morals, property, generosity, determinism and choice, the book would ...”

“... in the War Ministry in 1800, and had provoked the same irritated stupefaction in his superior, Pierre Daru. In 1824, Clémentine Curial, one of the most passionate of his mistresses, kept Beyle shut up for three days in the cellar of her country château, smuggling in food and drink and even disposing personally of the contents of his chamber-pot. The ...”

“... some explained the Great Plague of 1665 by appealing to comets; and in 1750 the French astronomer Pierre Maupertuis said that whole species must have perished in the past history of the Earth when comets came near. Evidently comets are uncomfortable neighbours for the planets in our Solar System: for several centuries they have been uncomfortable objects for ...”

“... engraving of the painting – produced at the behest of the Parisian art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, who briefly owned the work – had described the sitters as ambassadors. When, in 1873, the 4th Earl of Radnor lent the painting to the Royal Academy for that year’s Winter Exhibition, it was tentatively referred to in the accompanying catalogue ...”

“... against the conscription of young people into forced labour in Germany and took to the Maquis; Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac, the school’s Commanding Officer, himself joined the Resistance. Some participants in the Uriage school, among them Hubert Beuve-Méry and Jean-Marie Domenach, were active in founding such major post-war publications as Esprit and Le ...”

“... into one that is unambiguously straightforward. No less a historian of ancient culture than Jean-Pierre Vernant has written that ‘there is no myth of Oedipus in Greek tragedy. The Oedipus in the tragedy may have complexes, but he doesn’t have an Oedipus complex – that is obvious.’ Vernant’s essay ‘Oedipe sans Complexe’ remains a challenge to ...”

“... he went to America and launched his new business there from New York’s exceedingly expensive Pierre Hotel.) What was the nature of the ‘buccaneering’ genius which built the Hanson empire from a small transport undertaking into one of the biggest industrial conglomerates in the Western world? Hanson himself supplied the best reply: ‘I’m not ...”

“... marital adventures. Soon after his father’s death in 1919, he married Catherine Hessling, one of Pierre-Auguste’s models. He began to make films as a showcase for her talents (or at least, ambitions) and their marriage broke down when he continued to make films without her. Reputed to resemble her ferociously vain and fortune-seeking screen ...”

“... of flowing uphill for a short distance. Such an ‘ardent cloud’ devastated the town of St Pierre in Martinique during the eruption of Mont Pelé on 8 May 1902. Fisher and Co show photographs of an archetypal French provincial street, one of a thousand rues Victor Hugo, obliterated by the disaster. Hiroshima is the nearest we surfacedwellers have yet ...”

“... that you can’t tell the same story twice, they share a radical perception with Borges’s Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote. Supposedly the midwife of sameness, repetition ultimately tends the subtle womb of difference. One solution to such myseries, at least in their modern form, may lie in a reconstruction of the notion of authenticity itself. In ...”